Game Design Chronicles

Captain Cloudenhower

February 19, 2009 at 22:58

Captain Cloudenhower is a retired steam engineer known mostly for the invention of ionized steam. These days he lives among the clouds in his self build airship, The Duke - powered by his own invention of course. Only the birds know of his current adventures, though rumors tell of the discovery of floating islands and a new moon.

Click the image to see it in high resolution. It is my latest Lego creation. I figured I might as well start taking pictures of these.

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Mercy in Valkyria Chronicles

January 30, 2009 at 23:12

I have been busy with work lately, and as so many times before I forgot to use my blog. Playing Valkyria Chronicles though, inspired to write something not work related.

For those who don’t know about the game, it’s a Japanese RPG of the tactical kind. A rather linear structure brings the player through an amazing story and lots of perfectly designed and varied turn-based battles. What I found beautiful about the game, was not only the tear inducing story, the likable characters and the original battle mechanics, but also the way the themes of the story are woven into the reward systems in the game. The most clear example being that mercy is rewarded. The player is encouraged to have sympathy for the enemy foot soldiers through the story sequences, and in the battles shooting at them sounds harsh and hurting. Initially the player might accept this, and as in any other game attempt to simply shoot them all. When the battle ends though, there is no reward for the merciless - instead higher rewards comes from finishing fast. Winning the battle with as little bloodshed as possible becomes a goal, and is rewarded. To me this is a beautiful twist to a game about a war.

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Playful Interaction

September 12, 2008 at 21:57

I have been so busy with work and family that I almost forgot about this blog, but now I’m back and I will try to update regularly (or not…). I could write about attending the awesome Casual Connect conference in Seattle, or about some of the games I’m designing at the moment, but for now I just want to round of my thesis. I finished it in June and got my candidatus - or master or whatever a five year university education it is called in English. My thesis (download) is named Playful Interaction after the concept it studies:

Playful interactions require effort and reward it with growth of the brain patterns (cognitive structures, mental models, schemas etc.) associated with the applied dexterous, mental and social skills.

Playful interactions are sources of emotion potentially making the user feel, for example, stimulated, challenged, curious, proud, frustrated, confused or sad.

I split the concept into three main categories that can be applied to different parts of a game:

Playful selection (adding game mechanics or extra activities to menus) trains player’s skill in using the game’s game mechanics, inspires curiosity and prevents boredom.

Playful activation (mini-games and control challenges) removes trivial interactions at a low level and enriches the game with new game mechanics or new uses of existing mechanics. Also keeps the player attention high.

Playful guidance (providing help through discovery and challenge) provides help when and where it is needed and lets the player figure it out herself. Also, instructions are received when in a positive mood.

The main goal of playful interaction is simply to strengthen the user experience by doing things a little differently. The enjoyment and pleasure of playing a game comes from the way in which it slowly grows the patterns in our mind, and adding little mental, dexterous or social challenges to the parts of the game that is usually not very game-like (like menus, activation actions and guidance sequences) can expand this pleasure to new parts of the game. The central game mechanics might be the most important, but the rest of the package need not be boring either.

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Bad Usability

June 8, 2008 at 9:22

In the paper I wrote last year for the CHI workshop on user experience in games, I argued that bad usability can be a good thing if it is bad for the right reasons. An example could be the horse in Sony’s renowned Shadow of The Colossus; when the player is riding the horse, the controls are unresponsive and certainly not effective in the traditional usability sense. The designers’ reason to do this could be two-fold: First, it makes the horse feel alive and real - not even a dressage horse responds mechanically to its rider’s commands. Second, it frustrates the player into being annoyed with the horse, and perhaps even into whipping it repeatedly - imagine the guilt or remorse felt, when late in the game, your only companion, the horse, sacrifices itself to save you. That is a strong experience for a game to create, and it does so through bad usability (and nice directing). I do not know if this was Fumito Ueda’s intention, but for me it was the result.

My own current design approach is to create a list of intended emotional effects and try to build my design around that. More on this later.

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Physics and Puzzles

May 27, 2008 at 21:49

I should get back to writing something interesting before this turns into a travel diary. I’m almost done with my thesis and will be posting parts of it here soon. Now though, I will critique the design of the soon to be released puzzler Elefunk. It’s for Playstation 3 and only available in the Playstation Store. With its low price point my critique might seem harsh, but let’s just forget about the price and look at the design. Elefunk is about building bridges for elephants. That is a fun and charming idea and letting a physics system evaluate the strength of the bridges is nice as well. In theory, this should give the player a lot of freedom to design a bridge she likes. The time based score system encourages the player to build the bridge as fast and fragile as possible, such that levels cannot be easily mastered by simply building a huge and very strong bridge.

But Elefunk is no fun, and as I see it, this is due to one big mistake: The player has limited access to the building elements that make up the bridge. This effectively negates the freedom offered by the physics engine and creates puzzles with only one solution (roughly). This was obviously done to create difficult puzzles, because with unlimited supplies of building elements the game would have been really easy. I believe there is a much better way to control the difficulty level though. What the designer should have done, is to increase the weight of the elephant and to add more elephants. This would make the bridges harder to build in the limited space available, even when the player has unlimited access to the building elements. Also, the game would still have the time challenge if one wishes to optimize the score and building process.

Lesson learned? Don’t add a physics engine if you don’t intend to use the freedom it will offer.

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Nordic Game 2008: day 2

May 16, 2008 at 10:52

The second day at Nordic Game was pretty good too. It began with the guys from Harmonix showing of in Rock Band, before they told how they had approached the design of the game. Their simultaneous development of hardware and software was interesting, and I enjoyed hearing about their open company culture where nothing is kept secret from anyone.

Next I attended a session on designing games for children using either an existing or original IP. The difference did not seem to be that big. Both presenters agreed that children games should not be learning games. Learning is just a nice side effect - I completely agree, and finds that thought applicable to any game. Overtly trying to teach about a traditional school subject is pretty boring, but all games should teach the player something - even if that something is only usable in the game world.

The next session was the highlight of the conference. ICO designer Fumito Ueda and Forbidden Siren designer Keiichiro Toyama had joined a session on disruptive design. They did not talk much about that subject, but we all knew about their innovations anyway. The interesting bits was about their backgrounds. Fumito Ueda showed his early art exhibition design, and told that his first computer was an Amiga. He was thrilled to see the high amount of hands raised when he asked how many (former) Amiga users there were - in Japan no one knew the Amiga. His design philosophy was to affect people’s life, and he went about doing it by working on the visual side first. He also showed an early PS1 prototype of ICO, and an early multiplayer version of Shadow of The Colossus - three horse riders were battling a colossus together. Very nice and too bad it was left out of the final version! I was quite impressed with how much of the games Ueda himself had created - design and story are obvious, but he even did some of the character models and animation. Keiichiro Toyama talked about the new Forbidden Siren (New Translation) game, and how the sight jacking system had been improved using a split-screen setup. He also told the audience that he and Ueda was the only two designers within Sony who were allowed to do what ever they wanted. The last interesting bit from that session, was about Another World - apparently that game is an all time favorite and a great inspirational source to many Japanese game designers. Kind of strange that a western game has that position.

The conference ended with the usual panel discussion on the current state of Nordic game development. Apparently, the biggest problem is to get enough talent from outside our region. Peter Zetterberg from Microsoft also feared that Nordic developers would not reach their full potential unless they became more cocky and aggressive with their pitches. He could easily be talking about the phone conversation I had with him last year when he was with Codemasters…

All in all, it was a nice conference. Much better keynotes than last year, but the other sessions were not as good as last year I think - or maybe I just went to the wrong sessions.

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